Re: [dev] Minimal distributions

From: Hadrian Węgrzynowski <hadrian_AT_hawski.com>
Date: Sun, 25 Nov 2012 23:03:31 +0100

Dnia 2012-11-25, o godz. 15:54:40
Hugues Moretto-Viry <hugues.moretto_AT_gmail.com> napisał(a):

> Thank you for your constructive answer. Actually, I looked this page
> but I think many distribs are missing, just because they're not known.
> That's why I asked this question. I thought some persons use
> something I don't know.
>
> I think you misunderstood me about "No need to talk about...". It was
> related to Gentoo and Slackware I already know.
> I wanted to avoid unpleasant comments like "Use google & you'll find
> Gentoo".
> Your opinion still interests me.

I can tell you that I was searching for something like you described.
After few years of using Gentoo I can't stand it any more. I was using
one Ubuntu box, but it's like bad parts of rolling release with bad
parts of versioning release. I was living with testing packages for
all, but that was stupid and tedious. Later I switched to stable, but
that was also stupid and still tedious. Finally I got to conclusion
that rolling release can only really work for minimal installation or
"real system" - not distribution (packages thrown together glued by some
package manager).

It's so much better to have simple versioned core and then manage few
special applications yourself. Do you really need to have always the
latest Xorg, coreutils, mplayer and other basics? There are of course
some things that you will need to have at some specific version (often
just the latest). How many? If it is some library it's probably easier
to clone the repository and keep updating. If it is some application,
that you use professionally, you are keeping track of version changes
already. To know what will happen to you soon. If you need some
bug-fixes or features from next versions your distribution most
probably will not have nightly builds or latest version from VCS.
Gentoo will have these for some packages, but you can't really count on
them.

I prefer "real systems". There should be core that I can always count on
and some packages available. If there is specific package needed I get
the code from VCS (as I was doing already in Gentoo - the rolling
release distro). I am running one Slackware box now and I like it. It's
quite simple and consistent. Upgrade from one version to another is
pretty painless. I can get additional packages with slapt-get or
sbopkg. It's OK. Some people are using pkgsrc with Slackware.

If you need minimal installation and not much more even Gentoo should
be OK. Slackware should be more then OK. That's the only recommendation
that I can honestly give you.

Other then that, I would consider for such system (in particular
order): one of BSDs (primarily FreeBSD), TinyCore (maybe with some
additional package manager), Sorcerer. Never tired any of them.
Probably all of them can be used as rolling release (CURRENT versions
etc.).

> And for GNU, it's kinda a language abuse. I try to not forgot GNU
> when I talk about Linux.

GNU is not liked here ;)
Received on Sun Nov 25 2012 - 23:03:31 CET